Kota Kinabalu: Nearly seven decades after growing up at Maktab Sabah during its formative years, Patric Clarke has returned to the place he once called home, providing a rare living link to the school’s beginnings in 1957.
Patric is the son of Geoffrey Clarke, Maktab Sabah’s first principal, who headed the institution from 1957 to 1961 when it was known as Sabah College.
His return on Aug 26 was more than a courtesy visit as Patric had lived and grown up within the school grounds during his father’s tenure, in the years before Sabah achieved self-government and subsequently formed Malaysia in 1963.
Accompanied by David Porter and Vynn Suren of Borneo History, Patric revisited the former principal’s residence quarters where he had spent part of his childhood.
For Borneo History, the connection represents an opportunity to preserve Sabah’s past through individuals whose lives intersected with important periods in the State’s development.
Vynn described Patric as a “living legacy” of Borneo’s transformative decades and stressed the importance of preserving narratives connected to the Sabah of that era.
Patric also met current Maktab Sabah Principal Suhaimi Basri and members of the school administration before joining a guided tour of the school and meeting its present generation of students.
The encounter brought together two generations separated by almost seven decades — one who knew Maktab Sabah in its infancy and another inheriting the institution today.
Patric and Porter were later presented with copies of Maktab Sabah’s annual publications from 2022 to 2025.
Established as Sabah College in 1957, Maktab Sabah has since become one of Sabah’s longstanding educational institutions, with Geoffrey serving as its founding principal until 1961.
A little known history also is that Maktab Sabah is where the North Borneo Constabulary was sited before the war when the place was called Batu Tiga.
It served as the Japanese military headquarters for the west coast during the occupation and was where many Chinese especially were detained and tortured, including the guerrillas led by Albert Kwok. About 100 died there and the rest were transported for execution at Petagas later.
It was also where the British Military Administration which took over after the war tried and hanged many Japanese war criminals.